This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!

About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Sunday, May 31, 2015

In “My Own Man”, filmmaker David Sampliner, as he turns 40,
reflects on the pressures on him to conform to conventional pressures of
manhood, as he becomes a father to his first child. This film has a little bit of “Morgan
Spurlock”-style “Inside Man” character to it, but it is “softer”. I recall that some biologists say that new
father’s testosterone levels go down even more when they do child care, a
favorite point from the “Family Research Council”.

David grew up as a second child under a more “masculine”
older brother. His father, a successful
surgeon, had been a typical 1950s-style patriarchal husband in a Jewish family.

David reports that he lost the ability to throw a baseball
like a man at 10, and doesn’t know why.
So he won’t become a Clayton Kershaw.
But later he gets feedback that he lacks the “killer instinct” to
survive and protect people dependent on him. There is a play-acting
confrontation where he doesn’t show the instinct to say “F- you, get out of my
way” that a more aggressive man would.

He graduated from Yale, but bounced around a while (not
becoming a history professor), even working in a fast-food job (“paying his
dues”) before becoming a filmmaker.

Perhaps he is what Paul Rosenfels would have called “psychologically
feminine”.

He takes a testosterone test, and the results put him at the
low end of normal. In appearance, he
looks male enough, relatively trim with a hairy body. But compared to his brother in gym exercises,
he lacks coordination.

So he goes on a quest to discover masculinity, including
hunting lessons (aka “The Deer Hunter”).
His father thinks there is something of existential importance to being
able to survive on your own with a weapon and live on what you can kill (which
Mark Zuckerberg has tried). He also
takes voice lessons on assertiveness.

I remember a rude question on a job interview to become a
debt collector, whether I had ever gotten results by ordering other people
around. And authoritative assertion was
a problem when I worked as a substitute teacher.

The official site is here This is a Netflix (“Red Envelope”) original
documentary, an opportunity I will make personal note of. It is available on Instant Play.

At the end of the film, his wife announces a second child,
proudly. “Another baby in our family.”

Saturday, May 30, 2015

“Transcendent Man: Prepare to Evolve” (directed Robert Barry Ptolemy) is a
biography of information scientist Ray Kurzweil, based on his book “The
Singularity Is Near”.

The Singularity is that event where machine or artificial
intelligence can reproduce itself (without biological sex). He says, God doesn’t exist yet, but will when
the Singularity occurs. Biological
intelligence, actually starting with information (from reproductive molecules)
becomes machine intelligence and promulgates.
But of course that begs the question, could this process have already
happened on other planets.

The movie opens with a scene from “I’ve God a Secret” in
1966, where a 17-year-old Kurzweil plays a perfunctory piano piece sounding
like a Classical period fugato, and the secret is that it was composed on a
computer.

Kurzweil notes the amazing miniaturization of computers, and
predicts that nanocomputers will eventually move inside our bodies and enable
telepathy and mind control, way beyond today’s Internet (although it seems like
dolphins can do this now).

Kurzweil invented the flatbed scanner and reading devices
for the blind. Kurzweil believes that the original human body is rather
unimportant.

His own father died of heart disease before age 60, and he
had open heart surgery recently to repair a value. He described the procedure as turning you off
and back on again. Of course, you’re
cracked open like a lobster. He shows his scars, which are surprisingly small.

Kurzwell wants to transcend death and offer immortality, and
doesn’t think it is inevitable. He describes it as moving from empty room to
another. But some NDE’s describe a
blackness called “The Core”.

The official site is here. (New Video). The score has a lot of music by Philip Glass.

Friday, May 29, 2015

“Survivor” (2015, directed by James McTeigue and written by
Philip Shelby) is a fast-paced thriller about counter terrorism, but it pulls
too many coincidental punches to be believable.

Kate Abbott (Mila Jovovich) is a foreign service officer
with a lot of non-European language skills and hints of CIA connects, assigned
to the US embassy in London to help with security. Soon she screens a supposed
physician Dr. Emil Balan (Roger Rees) and becomes suspicious. Though the
embassy employees don’t share her concerns, she persists. Balan builds a plastic bomb and tries to use
it to kill her when she is eating at a nearby restaurant. She survives, and in a rather improbable
chain, is framed for the death of another visitor. In saving herself, she uncovers a plot to
create a huge natural gas explosion at Times Square in New York on New Years
Eve, the details of which really seem impossible to pull off.

There is also another subplot, to create stock market chaos
on the first day after New Year’s and profit from massive short selling. The
opening of the film shows a captured Green Beret in Afghanistan being burned
alive by Taliban captors, but the soldier’s companion is kept alive and
tortured. The film implies that the soldier is the doctor’s son, and that the “doctor”
went on a rampage of assassination to pay ransom to the terrorists in
Afghanistan to save his son.

The film (indoors shot in Bulgaria) often gives a handsome
look at modern downtown London. The
acting and chase style is that of many 80s and 90s thrillers.

The official site ishere (Millennium films). The movie has a very
limited theatrical release, as I saw it at AMC Hoffman in Alexandria., before a
modest audience. The audience seemed to
agree that the plot was very improbable. It was probably financed (with a lot of Canadian backing) for quick DVD
and streaming release.

This film should not be confused by a 2014 film of the same
title by John Lyde, about a crashing landing on an alien planet.

The countdown scene on New Year’s Eve in NYC reminds me a
similar scene near the end of “Strange Days” (1995) by Kathryn Bigelow, with
New Years Eve 2000 set in Los Angeles.
In that film, (with Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett) there is the plot
device of mind reading (or hacking) and wireless transfer to other people
wearing the same device. This is a riveting film (one of the best from the 90s).
When I saw it at Pentagon City in Arlington, the film broke 20 minutes before
the end, and I went later to see the end, although people were discussing the
ending on AOL message boards at the time.

Remember that a real terror plot on the West Coast was intercepted New Years Eve 2000.

Picture: Times Square, Dec. 1, 2011, my visit.

Note: "San Andreas" is reviewed on my "Films on Major Threats to Freedom" blog May 30.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

One of the most interesting confrontations in “Woman in Gold”
(by Simon Curtis) occurs when young lawyer Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) does
a job interview in downtown Los Angeles. He is quizzed on what went wrong when
he went solo practicing law, and is asked if he is “ready to work with people”. (That question could be asked of me, but it doesn't work if I have to pimp someone else's business.) The interviewers note he is grandson of
composer Arnold Schoenberg. That
composer’s reputation, and his twelve-tone technique get mentioned a few times,
and some of the tone poem “Verklarte Nacht” for string sextet (which is an
early postromantic work and tonal) gets played near the end.

Schoenberg has one possible client dangling, however. When he goes to the home of
Holocaust-survivor Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren) he makes some social faux
pas. But that only starts a jerky
relationship where he represents her legal battle to get back a painting of her
aunt “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” from the Austrian government, since it was
stolen by the Nazis when they sacked Vienna as Hitler took over most of
continental Europe.

Her back story, shown in sepia (without green in some
scenes, as a colorblind person might see it) of the harassment of her family by
the Nazis and of her escape, is quite harrowing. The current day parallel of course comes from
ISIS. The brutality is expressed in
political terms, as the “Jews” are called “pigs” by invading soldiers. But the extreme Left called most well-off
middle class people that in the late 1960s.

Randol’s new employers don’t think he has a case (they’re
wrong), and he winds up having to quit to pursue the case on his own, and
resurrecting his own law firm, going into debt even as his wife (Katie Holmes)
has a second child. Despite his
analytical, personally reticent nature, Randol seems to be quite tender in
caring for his own family. In this manner, the structure of this movie’s plot
resembles “Pilot Error” (yesterday) where a reporter quits to pursue her own
urgent news story.

After the first visit to Vienna with Maria, Randol has an
epiphany in a Barnes and Noble bookstore when he finds a coffee table art book
with a reproduction of the painting. He
realizes that if the Austiran government-owned museum is doing commerce in the
US with American booksellers, a lawsuit can be filed in the US. This is certainly interesting to me, as soon
I will be dealing with booksellers regarding my own book. I wondered if the same would be true of the
book were sold online to customers in the US but not in physical stores. Eventually, Reynolds argues before the US
Supreme Court (the judges played by actors) which rules in 2004 that the suit
can go forward (“Republic of Austria v. Altmann”) because the Foreign
Sovereignty Immunities Act (and its exception) apply to conduct before 1976.
The argument that Altmann could jeopardize US foreign policy (then in Iraq)
gets some laughs.

There’s a scene where a clerk confuses “Austria” with “Australia”.

Randol Schoenberg has his own video "The Art of the Heist: The Lady in Gold" on YouTube to supplement the film. He is a major founder of the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles.

The official site ishere (The Weinstein Company and BBC). I saw this early Thursday afternoon before a
small audience at Regal Ballston.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

The film “Pilot Error”, directed by Joe Anderson, written
with Roger Rapaport (the producer), based on Rapoport’s novel. And although the end credits have the usual
“fiction” disclaimer, the film appears to be based on the 2009 crash of Air France 447 (Airbus A330), from
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Paris, as explained in Wikipedia here. The flight tragedy may be related to an
icing of the aircraft pitot tubes, and the inability of the other systems and
possibly the pilots to respond correctly.

The film, essentially a live-action docudrama, might be
compared to documentaries about other high-profile aviation disasters,
including “TWA Flight 800” (2013) by Kristina Borgesson (My “CF” blog, Jan. 4,
2014), and CNN’s “Vanished: The Mystery of Malaysia Flight 370” (TV blog, Oct.
8, 2014). The tone of the film also
would apply to the investigation of the major Amtrak Train 188 wreck in
Philadelphia earlier this month, where engineer error seems to have happened
but might have been related to distraction, sabotage or some other equipment
failure (as well as lack of automated speed control).

The movie and book provide a fictitious airline (“Air Paris”)
and aircraft (“Atlas”), and suppose an eager reporter in Milwaukee uncovers a
quasi-coverup by the airline. Rio is replaced by Buenos Aries.

The writing about the reporter’s professional and personal
situations seems a little overwrought, following screenwriting 101 ideas about
creating rooting interest and insurmountable obstacles for protagonists. Nicola Wilson (Kate Thomsen), as the film
opens, takes repeated voicemails from a helicopter mom in Paris as she sits in
an airport. Soon, we learn she missed
the flight and went back to work. (I
broke a vacation once in 1976 for quirky reasons.) Along the way, the film brings up the idea
that you could forget to bring your passport for an international flight, or
that you could use your spouse’s (don’t know if that’s true). Then, the movie has her taking “fear of
flying” remediation lessons. Well, I don’t
swim. I guess you could build a movie
plot around that. In fact, that idea
could reinforce a plot point in my own novel, in a way I hadn’t thought about
before.

But when she learns that her best friend apparently died on
the crash (there is a suggestion that Nicola’s own fear put the friend on the
flight, some bad karma) she delves into it, and gets into a fight with her
employer. Her bosses (such as Richard
Riehle, who reminds me of Wilfred Brimley) warn she need to write the stories
that readers want (to make the paper profitable) – well, aren’t reporters and
journalists supposed to be objective and tell the complete truth? The paper would run a big lawsuit risk
because, in France, truth alone is not an adequate defense to libel (Kitty
Kelly has said the same thing about British law in talking about her book “The
Royals”).

In anger, Nicola quits and develops an independent video
blog to report on the accident. She
maxes her credit cards and needs to pimp her site and beg for money. I guess she needs to follow all of Blogtyrant’s
(that’s Australian blogging guru Ramsay Taplin) advice on how to make niche
blogs make big money.

She writes a book manuscript and seems to have a separate
publisher (she won’t have to self-publish, even if she has already self-instantiated
on the blog). But another writer plagiarizes her but then changes the
conclusions to blame the crash on “pilot error”. Eventually she travels to France for a
surprising conclusion.

This film has been produced by the author (Dewey Decimal
Productions) and distributed by Michigan Blue Lake (site ).
The on location filming was in Michigan (a state that want so use the film
industry to bring back Detroit), around Milwaukee, and in France, and looks
sharp. It has very limited
showings. Yesterday, there seemed to be
an error in search engine show times, and I went to the Cinema Arts theater in
Fairfax VA and was told that the theater had been rented to show it one day
previously. The producer provided me a
screening link on Vimeo to watch it this morning. He also says that theaters asked that the
film not be released on DVD or streaming while showing in limited theatrical
release. This practice sounds silly (and
unfair if he really had to rent the theater, as I was told), keeping content ‘scarce”,
when it shows in few theaters and only briefly.
(A normal Amazon rental is $6.99, less than most movie tickets.) I’ve
talked about this issue by email with Mark Cuban (Blogmaverick and Magnolia
Pictures) who admits that “lowballing” (my term) is a fear in media circles, but Magnolia
Pictures has been willing to release pictures on DVD or video and in theaters
at the same time, hoping that sincere movie customers (in larger cities) will
go to see the films in theaters. IFC did
the same with “Good Kill”, reviewed here Monday. The same issue exists in book
publishing, especially with self-published books, where hardcopy competes with
Kindle or Nook and free PDF’s online. This
is becoming known as the “It’s Free” problem.

The film make come across, ultimately, as a didactic on what
airlines must do to make flights safer.
Toward the end, some of the scenes seem written to make these points,
rather than simply to follow the story.
One can certainly ask, should this film have been a non-fiction
documentary about the Air France flight instead? It seems odd that it would be shown in rental
spaces (like Christian films are sometimes) rather than (as far as I know)
enter the festival circuit and then established corporate distributors. I do wonder if IFC or Magnolia would be
interested in this film, it would seem to fit their cultures.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

“Iris” is a gentle biography of New York fashion and
interior designer Iris Apfel, now 93, and her husband Carl, now 100, directed
by Albert Maysles.

Iris usually appears in very intricate fashions, with huge
glasses. Although using a cane and
sometimes a wheelchair, she remains as intellectually sharp and wise as ever.

Early in the film, she is interviewed by domestic diva
Martha Stewart, in 2006 (after Stewart’s own return from incarceration and home
confinement for insider trading (there was a 2005 TV film by Eric Bross. “Martha Behind Bars”
with Cybil Shepard).

She often mentions a business connection with “Old World
Seamsters”, a name that reminds me of the novel “Silas Marner”.

Iris makes many comments about taking herself in
stride. She does not covet women who
were “pretty” but who “lost it” as they aged.
She insists on making herself as active as possible, not thinking about
aches and pains of aging. Her momentum
keeps her going. But she does mention
recovering from a hip fracture.

I saw the film at the Cinema Arts in Fairfax VA in early
evening in a small audience. However, I
had expected to see Joe Anderson’s “Pilot Error” (about a little known plane crash); it had played for only one day and was for a
while mistakenly listed as playing today.
I am trying to see if there is a DVD for that film.

Monday, May 25, 2015

“Good Kill”, as the title of a film, sounds like an
oxymoron, and the effect of this indie film by Andrew Niccol, is rather
disturbing. ("Drones" is an alternate original title.) The obvious comparison will
be with “American Sniper” (January 16), where the political left (like Michael
Moore) called sniping “cowardly,” rather like "fighting with your fingernails." This film is much smaller, with only a few
characters and most of the action “simulated”, although set up in Morocco. Here, an Air Force Major Thomas Egan (Ethan
Hawke), relieved of flying sabre jets, works in a detachment in the desert near
Las Vegas playing video games, directing actual drone strikes against suspected
terrorists in Afghanistan and later Yemen.
It’s the ultimate “fight without fighting”. It’s not hard to predict that the ethical
problems will affect his marriage (wife January Jones) and family in a tract
house maybe ten miles from the Strip, totally treeless. It shouldn’t be hard to anticipate that
alcohol will affect him, too. The events
take place in 2010, and are supposed to be based on real history.

The complications set in when the detachment is contacted by
the CIA, directly from Langley, VA (where Egan thinks life is green and safe –
he doesn’t know Washington DC), and told to make kills under more generalized
circumstances (based on “signatures”).
The commander (Bruce Greenwood) is OK with this, but not so much the
other crew members, especially Airman Vera Suarez (Zoe Kravitz) chosen for the
unit because of her unusual IT and gaming skills. At this point, a movie reviewer has to say, I
don’t know if the CIA really does this, or how the chain of command really
works when the CIA interacts with the Armed Forces. But the president (Obama) has apparently
approved. Remember, this history occurs
before Osama bin Laden was taken out in 2011 (“Zero Dark Thirty”, Jan. 11,
2013).

The discussion leads to the rationalizations for taking out
civilians as “collateral damage” (again, the problem uncovered by Bradley
Chelsea Manning (CF blog, April 7, 2010).
The commander points to the civilians in the Twin Towers on 9/11. But Vera says that the Times Square plot
(which was foiled by sharp-eyed public and NYPD) was motivated specifically by
the fact that civilians in Muslim countries had been killed by Americans. (In fact, Jahar’s “manifesto” scribbled in a
boat said that.) This sounds rather personal.
I can recall, back in 1972, listening in on a (secular) far left wing
meeting in Newark, NJ where even individuals who benefited from the capitalist
system and were sheltered as salaried professionals “had it coming to them”. I certainly have some unfavorable karma on my
hands. I worked as a math instructor in
grad school and flunked some students, probably exposing them more to the
Vietnam draft. Then I was able to game
the system when I was eventually drafted to avoid combat. Put all this together, it isn’t pretty. Death itself eventually comes to every single
one of us, and is not controversial. But
some of us don’t have the right to ever be called victims (instead of
casualties) or be memorialized. We need
to get this right.

Eventually, Egan chokes on the job, leading to an ending
that I don’t completely buy.

The film has very limited theatrical release, but I saw it
at ArcLight in Bethesda MD, before a small audience Memorial Day. It’s also available
on Amazon Instant Play ($7). I think it helps to see this in a theater if
possible. The distributor is IFC and I suspect major studios didn’t want their
brands associated with this film. But Paramount (Vantage) is listed by YouTube as renting the
film. Voltage Pictures and Dune (usually
associated with big sci-fi and Universal) are listed as production companies.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

“Odd Man Out” (1947), by Carol Reed (screenplay by F.L.
Green), makes an adventure story of a fugitive for a “terror” organization after
a robbery goes bad, without taking sides in the bigger political issue. That problem, of course, would be the IRA, as
it developed later in Northern Ireland’s history in succeeding decades. The film appears to be shot in Belfast, which
is not named.

James Mason plays Johnny McQueen, the fugitive. He has been shielded by a girlfriend Kathleen
Sullivan (Kathleen Ryan). After a firefight, in which he is shot and in which
he has shot a cop, two other female passers-by take him in and give him first
aid before he gets strength to leave.

The film also plays on the idea that ordinary people face
practical dilemmas when sheltering outlaws or particularly political
rebels. They might have to choose
between the law on the one hand, and protection from gangs on the other.

A good part of the first movement of the Schubert "Unfinished" Symphony in B Minor plays early in the film. There's a line "in the left wing" (where Johnny hides) that makes a great pun. There's a great reflective image of different images in "soap bubbles". There's a line from a Catholic priest, "in my profession, there is not good and bad, only guilt and innocence". Toward the end, the symphonic music of composer William Alwyn (like in his symphonies) kicks in, as the couple heads for a tragic reunion before police, after Johnny, running around with his arm in a sling, sermonizes from Corinthians.

The film was produced by the J. Arthur Rank organization,
which became known as perhaps the leading British film company in the 1950s and
which was often played in “arthouses” at the time (like the McArthur and
Ontario theaters in Washington DC, and later the Biograph). The distributor is Janus.

I wonder if this film inspired the 1966 film "The Chase" as well as "The Fugitive" (two films).

Picture: Northern Ireland, in the 1980s, Mother’s estate
picture (not from film, which is in black and white).

Saturday, May 23, 2015

When Disneyland opened in the 50s (first in California, and
later in Orlando), and had its weekly television series, “Tomorrowland” was my
favorite kingdom (although Adventureland, source of nature documentaries like “The
Vanishing Prairie” and “The Living Desert” and even "Secrets of Life") was about on peer, followed by
Frontierland (Fess Parker), and Fantasyland.

I don’t know if the futuristic city of spires, monorails,
roller coasters, and fall-through swimming pools, rising like Oz from prairies (call it “Metropolis” – KCMO – from “Smallville”)
is actually replicated at one of the Disney theme parks (like Epcot in Orlando -- and I do intend to visit Orlando soon). If so, even with Imax, you don’t get to see a
lot of the geography of the place. In my own “space station” in my DADT
screenplay, I propose a monorail tunnel set up as a Mobius strip, which can get
interesting.

The story, by Canadian director Brad Bird, Jeff Jensen and
Damon Lindelof, seems rather cluttered, but the backstory concept seems fair
enough. The pre-history starts at the
1964 World’s Fair in Flushing (across the #7 IRT tracks from the Mets Citi
Field now), which I visited twice. This was
a curious time, early in LBJ’s administration, just as Vietnam was getting started,
when the City had been “cleaned up” (by closing down most gay bars, except
those controlled by the Mafia). You see
the optimistic, science-fair idea of innovation, and take a ride “It’s a small
world.” The boy Frank Walker is given a
mysterious orange and blue pendant that transports him to the future
temporarily, to see the teeming city.

Then in present day, high school student Casey Newton (an
aggressive Britt Robertson) finds the same pendant in Houston, sees the future,
and goes on a wild chase across the bayou (this section was apparently filmed
in Florida) until she encounters the decrepit home and lab of the adult Casey
(George Clooney). Sidekick Athena
(Raffey Cassidy) will turn out to be a hologram, as is the family dog. They also encounter a techie sage (Tim
McGraw) who helps unscramble tachyon theory, that somehow enables one to view
the future. The concept of splitting the Eiffel Tower for a rocket launch is rather silly.

And the future they see is grim, taking us through global
warming leading to nuclear terror. So,
somehow we get to change the future, less some alien civilization colonize and
replace us (and it’s emerald city might not survive our waste, either).

The official site is here, filmed in Florida, Los Angeles, Spain, France, Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and the Bahamas. I expected to see Louisiana in the credits for
the bayou scene.

I saw the film at the AMC Tysons’s in Imax. The Saturday afternoon crowd was not as large
as I would have expected. The aspect
ratio is listed as 2.20:1, but it seemed a little less wide than that on the
Imax screen. Standard anamorphic is
wider, 2.35:1.

Two pictures: a “Tomorrowland”-like city from my own train
set, and a Mobius strip.

Friday, May 22, 2015

“Echelon Conspiracy” (2009, Greg Marcks) is the second
conspiracy film this week for me. And
this one is all of the map in anticipating the supposed abuses of the NSA and
Edward Snowden’s revelations, but, in mixing in some sci-fi with some
intimations of artificial intelligencve, it piles on too many separate “plot pieces” to
be believed. The movie plot happens in a
backdrop of the NSA’s wanting continued funding from Congress for its most
clandestine activities. And today Congress struggles with renewing the Patriot Act.

Max (Shane West) is appealing enough (even looking good in
shorts) as a computer security engineer.
He starts getting bizarre text messages that change the course of his
life. One of them gets him to miss a
flight from Bangkok that subsequently crashes.
Down the road, he gets another message that enables him to make a
killing at a casino in the Czech Republic. I thought about the movie “21”. But this is just hacking, not
card-counting. Furthermore, Max proves
he can deal with others and manipulate them on the fly to “get what he wants”.

Max also contacts a (handsome) Russian hacker, Yuri (Sergey Cubanov) to
take advantage of his “luck”.

The plot turns here as the casino security chief (Edward
Burns) comes after him. But then the NSA jumps in, under the direction of
Raymond Burke (Martin Sheen), who thinks that these incidents are signs of
cyberwarfare directed from an AI system called Echelon. Maybe it’s quantum computing, and maybe it’s
run by the Russians, or maybe it’s run deeper within our own CIA and NSA (in the midpoint of the film, the project is identified as belonging only to the NSA, but don't believe it). Of course, now Max runs for his life.

The movie really doesn’t give a very credible picture of how
international intrigue really works, being too fast-paced (brief at 100
minutes). But it is a spectacle to
watch, with scenes of Bangkok and Moscow (especially the Kremlin, for
real). It finally winds up in Nebraska
(near SAC).

The epilogue, with Yuri’s shaving his face (not his chest)
before a meeting in Moscow, is enigmatic.
Does it anticipate what Vladimir Putin is doing now?

As a matter of credibility, I don’t think I would “obey” a
sequence of texts I got sent to my smart phone, even if the first one could
save my life.

Paramount no longer has an official site for the film. I wonder why studios don’t keep these
up. I rented the film from Netflix. This film is much more "conventional" than the quirky indie "The Conspiracy" reviewed earlier this week.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

I remember the “Mad Max” movies from the 80s, when living in
Dallas: “The Road Warrior” and “Beyond
Thunderdome”. But while George Miller’s
new “Mad Max: Fury Road” may do what movies should do, place you in another
world, it doesn’t present much to root for, that’s relevant.

The opening shot (actually Namibia) looks like Mars, until a
lizard emerges from the rocks to get stomped by Max (Tom Hardy). Soon, we meet Imperator Furiosa, a crew-cut
an mannish Charlize Theron, who has lost an arm. The movie comprises a fighting adventure to
get her back to her homeland from which he was stolen, which is supposed to
have an ancient oasis.

We could wonder if this is another planet, until someone
mentions a satellite still orbiting in the night sky. So we’re dealing with the dystopian, post
nuclear war world, filled with mutants, the most spectacular of whom appear at
the end, among the iron works and deformed humans (and albino) who look like “The
Guild” from Frank Herbert’s “Dune” (I actually liked that 1984 film).

So is this demolition derby worth two hours and the price of
a 3-D summer movie? Matter of taste.

There are some spectacular effects, like the haboob, with
the embedded tornadoes. The music, by Christian Vorlander, is most
effective. At one point, the score
excerpts the Dies Irae of Verdi’s Requiem. At the end, before the credits, when
an aquifer finally gushes, the music moves up in a scale to a tremendous climax
on a final C Major chord (like the end of the Sibelius Seventh). The music during the closing credits sounds
like a genuine concern overture, sonata-like, crashing down to a C Minor close.

The official site is here. Warner Brothers and Village Roadshow played sound effects similar to Lionsgate's "movies to die for" during their opening trademarks.

I saw this in a smaller auditorium at the Regal Ballston
Common, before a fair weeknight audience. Regal played 25 minutes of previews,
running the trailer for “Jurassic World” (introduced by Chris Pratt)
twice. I have to admit that “Ant-Man”
and “Entourage” look interesting.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Today, before a satellite performance of “Man and Superman”
(Drama blog), the host Angelika theater showed “Espana Is Different”, by
Salvador Guera, from DC Shorts. Somewhere
in a modern Spanish city, a teenager gives another boy a ride on his bicycle,
and the image winds up in an art gallery.

I added two more gay films to the mix for the day.

In “Violine” (Germany, or “Violin”, by Roman Ilyushenko, 11
min), a young violinist (Johannes Huth) brings home a trick to his apartment in
former East Germany (so it looks). There
is an out-of-tune piano (like in “Wozzeck”) and a violin, which Johnannes
plays. He tries to give his more
athletic-looking guest (Hannes Sell) a lesson.
It turns intimate, before there is an unfortunate interruption.

The main film for the day is the Swiss short “Prora” (23 min,
Switzerland, in German, French and Polish, it sounds). Jan (Tom Gramenz) explores the ruins of
Prora, a former Nazi camp and later East German communist detention center on
the Baltic Sea. He meets another
college-age kid Matthieu (Swen Gippa), and the boys explore the dangerous ruins
together. They become intimate, and then
Matthieu has second-thoughts about what has happened, and they fight, leading
Jan to be slightly injured. But then
they reconcile, keeping all the boundless energy of youth just before brains are fully grown (that takes to about age 25). The youtube link ishere,
and official site is here

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

“Little Hope Was Arson”, by Theo Love, is a rather tragic
documentary about the demise of two young men in East Texas. It does present
the police work, but it plays up the human element and down the sensationalism,
compared to, say, a Dateline crime episode.

Early on New Years Morning, 2010, a Baptist church in Tyler
was burned down, shortly after a New Year’s Eve gathering. Nine more churches within a 40 mile radius
would burn, with the fires started with some degree of “skill”.

A break would occur when a female dispatcher with a sheriff’s
department would learn that her brother could be involved. Eventually, two young white male suspects
emerged. One of them had been an
outstanding teen and taken church seriously, but mysteriously drifted into
drugs once in college. The defendants
seem to have little motive other than compulsive behavior. But one of the defendants, from prison,
seemed to resent the self-righteousness of some “Christians”.

The film, consisting mostly of interviews, does explore some
of the values of the Bible Belt. One
woman talks about the idea of a Bible verse for every problem (like a
toothache). But she also says she wouldn’t
turn in a family member to the law, because that would be snitching.

Both men would, after guilty pleas, get concurrent life
sentences plus extra time to make parole difficult.

The official site is here (Orchard Films). I watched it online at
Netflix.

Monday, May 18, 2015

“The Conspiracy” (2012, 84 minutes), directed and written by
Christopher MacBride is another road (essentially) thriller winding up with a
tantalizing ritual (but so does “Bugcrush”).
It also takes an overview of conspiracy theories, with news footage of
both 9/11 and the JFK assassination.

Aaron and Jim (Aaron Poole and James Gilbert), brothers in
their late 20s, work together as documentary filmmakers in Toronto. Jim, a little more laid back, is married with
a family.

A blogger sends them a link about an aging conspiracy
theorist Terrance G. (Alan Peterson).
They want to make a film about him, but shortly after they meet him, the
codger disappears. Aaron, the more
articulate and aggressive, tracks down some charts other materials left in the
old man’s apartment concerning (as Aaron later finds from another single
source) a “Tarsus Club”, and Jim agrees with him to proceed. They put all they know up on the Web and see
what Google will bring them. (They probably don’t follow all the detailed
advice of “Blogtyrant”.) Aaron’s
apartment gets burglarized, and Aaron moves back in with his brother’s family,
even though they both suspect he was targeted, although the police think it was
just random.

The writer who had identified the Tarsus Club contacts them,
and says he will help them only if they take down all they have put up from the
Internet. (I’ve been asked to take down very specific materials about a few
people over 15 years, but only in rare circumstances.) The club, of world leaders, believes in a
legendary pre-Christian diety, Mithras. The custom of the handshake is said to
have originated with the secret society.
What follows is an engaging treasure hunt, as the brothers are
eventually led to an initiation ceremony in a large rural estate.

The progress of the initiation takes about 20 minutes of the
film, and is partly outdoors. The
brothers become separated as Aaron is “chosen” and wears the bull mask,
although his business suit stays on.

The film has an epilogue in which we learn that Aaron has
disappeared and might have joined Terrane, while Jim continues raisin his
family, transformed by the experience, wanting to hunt for truth while needing
to have his work make money.

The movie does play the World government card, and rehearses
a JFK speech about the shadows.

I would like to see what exactly happens to Aaron, even if
it were in a deleted scene on a DVD. (I watched it on Netflix, but I see there
is a BluRay DVD.) I have a similar
initiation scene in my novel, and one in my main screenplay, and you really
need to know accurately what happens with each character.

The official site ishere The main site comes up “unavailable”. The production company is Resolute Films; the
distributors are XLrator and E-one.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

“The Purchase Price” (1932) is another pre-code film, relatively
brief at 68 minutes, in black and white, by William Wellman (on the same DVD from WB and Netflix as
“Other Men’s Women”, May 14), with some interesting moral and plot concepts
that anticipate Douglas Sirk. The film
is based on the story “The Mud Lark” by Arthur Stringer.

The heroine, Joan Gordon (Barbara Stanwyck), singing “torch”
in NYC clubs, rejects her Mafia-connected boyfriend Eddie Fields (Lyle Talbot)
for the more upstanding Don Leslie (Hardie Albright). For her safety, she flees
to Montreal (actually shown once), where she tries to change her name, but the
criminal syndicate recognizes her picture.
She bribes a homely chambermaid (who wears wool stockings to cover her
own gams) to use her name after the chambermaid tells her that she (Leila
Bennett) had agreed to go to North
Dakota to marry a farmer who had found her through a “marriage agency” and that
she had used a phot of Joan instead of her own because Joan is more physically
attractive, and more likely to get a husband. This is an example of pre-Internet fraud with “photo-tagging”.

Joan, unaware of what will be like to live on a ranch during
the Great Depression, makes the journey. The new husband Jim Gilson (George
Brent) has to keep his distance at first, but gradually they fall in love. The values of rural life (horse-drawn wagons, no cars) become apparent, when
a local newspaper prints a story about their two-day journey to get a scuttle
of coal. Neighbors help one another in
this culture, as there is now FDR big government yet to help them. At one point, she visits a neighboring girl,
where a teenage girl takes care of her mother and newborn baby brother because
father is away, and she finds she can really help people. That scene, in particular, shows what family values meant in
this culture, even if the topic o arranged marriages seems silly and
exploitative. Women really had to take care of the home in this world.

Things get complicated as the bank tries to foreclose on Jim’s
farm, and a wealthier neighbor Bull (David Landau) offers to bail them out in
return for Joan’s favors. Then Eddie
shows up, having skip-traced her through the underworld. Eddie thinks he can
get Joan back if he secretly bails out the farm, but then a jealous Bull almost
burns them out. The title of the film
has some double entendre.

The North Dakota scenes sometimes appear to have been shot in Arizona, and other scenes show wooded hills. The western part of the state does have some buttes and badlands (less extensive than in South Dakota), which I visited in 1998.

The DVD has two shorts. One of these is the 17-minute “Clue”
tale, “The Wall Street Mystery” (1931), by Arthur Haley, where Dr. Crabtree
(Donald Meek) solves the murder of two stockbrokers at night in an office. The
movie has 1929-puns like “killing on Wall Street”, and a woman (found in the “closet”)
who had “lost everything but the vote”. At
the end, Crabtree says, “I a man bites a dog, that’s news. But if a dog bites a
detective, that’s good news.”

There is also an animated short “Moonlight for Two”, by
Rudolf Ising, which WB says it includes only to demonstrate the racial
prejudices of the era, but says it does not approve of these. There is a courtship battle between “white”
and “black” dogs,

On a 2011 Samsung DVD player, I found that the player could
not access past track 8 on the second feature (because of the unusual
organization of the DVD), a software incompatibility. It did work OK on a more modern player with
my newer computer.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

“While We’re Young”, by Noah Baumbach is about filmmaking,
ethics, truth, marriage, and morality, all in a 97-minute little New York
comedy.

Josh (Ben Stiller), married to Cornelia (Naomi Watts) and
still childless in middle age, teaches film and is trying to finish a 6-hour
documentary about political power. He
has trouble telling people what it’s about, especially Cornelia’s dad, also a
director Ira (Peter Yarrow). One day
they meet a couple a generation younger, Jamie (Adam Driver), also a
documentary filmmaker, married to Darby (Amanda Seyfried).

Josh has told the class that documentary is about other
people, while fiction is about the self.
He says that non-diction documentary should be about the self, too.

Jamie is quite flashing, warm, non-judgmental, and willing
to look as free as necessary with the body art (temporary) on his
forearms. His documentary has to do with
a soldier Kent (Brady Corbet) returned from Afghanistan. He has a bizarre idea for how to pick subject
other than himself, depending on real-world responses from old friends from
surprise Facebook contacts. In my own
life, there are people who prefer everything be real world (no social
media). That idea creeps into the
script.

Their interaction gets quirky. At one point, the two couples attend a purification ceremony in an apartment where everyone vomits after taking ipecac.

Toward the end, there’s an ethical battle, as Jamie
“falsifies” his own part of the story, setting up a confrontation at the climax
of the film. Finally, the issue of having children, and adoption, even from troubled areas of the world, surfaces. Do younger adults have a looser moral compass, depending on the idea of over-sharing and that "everything belongs to everyone?" That does, for example, bear on copyright and piracy issues in film and music. (At tone point, there was a quote of the infamous Karl Marx quote about abilities and needs, that got banded about in parody in the barracks in my own Army days.) Is any journalistic license allowed in reporting? That sounds like the problems with Brian Williams, former and now defrocked anchor at NBC for "exaggerating" (although Williams isn't so young). Journalistic objectivity is another good issue, in a society that sometimes needs people to take sides.

The film uses a lot of Vivaldi, and some pop songs. At one point, Josh seems to be singing to
himself “I want to do it” in a theme that resembles the “I want to do you” from
Modern Family (not credited).

Friday, May 15, 2015

“Saint Laurent”, directed by Bertrand Bonello, is a snazzy
biography (dramatized) of the peak years of the career, and accompanying gay
love life, of French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent (Gaspard Ulliel).

The film is framed at two levels. At the beginning, we’re in 1974, when Yves,
now 38, checks into hotel in Paris to do
an interview that could lead to legal problems (not well explained). The movie then takes us back to the mid 1960s
and marches forward. In the last forty
minutes or so, an old Yves remembers the end of the height of his career, and
imagines an obit in 1977. Actually, according to Wikipedia, the career went on
a long time. Yves, apparently having
escaped HIV, died of a brain tumor in 2008 (right after a male civil
union) at 72.

The film shows some of relevant history, fast-framed. These
include the 1968 French student riots (also a backdrop for Bertolucci’s 2004
film “The Dreamers”) as well as Vietnam War protests in the US. It barely mentions St. Laurent’s early days
at Dior, and the effect of his conscription in 1960 into the Algerian uprising
(remember the film “The Battle of Algiers”).
Yves himself was born in Algeria.

Of course, it’s the love life that keeps one’s
attention. There’s an effective early
disco scene, with 70s music reminding me of my own time in New York. For a long time, his lover would be Jacques
(Louis Garrel). The film is very explicit
in a few scenes, with total nudity, but in other scenes the camera tilts away,
as in one tragic scene where a beloved dog eats pills and will die of the
overdose. I suspect the DVD will have a
director’s cut or deleted scenes with more “detail”. There’s a party with a barber chair, which is
not really used to its full potential. Yves, as a 30-something adult, is shown as slender and attractive, but starting to dwindle from his chain-smoking and drug abuse.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

“Other Men’s Women” (1931, directed by William A. Wellman,
Warner Brothers) is a brief (70 minutes) but surprisingly effective
black-and-white drama film, “pre-code” in the early “talking pictures” period,
with two train wrecks, a pertinent topic right now.

The story concerns a steam locomotive railroad engineer Bill
(Grant Withers) who gets into a competition with co-worker Jack (Regis Toomey)
for the same woman Lily (Mary Astor). A
fight leads to a small train wreck (at the film’s mid point) where the caboose on their train from a merging branch track is struck by another locomotive, and Jack, injured, is blinded. But later, in a storm resulting in massive
flooding, Jack save’s Bill’s life, before being wiped away in a river when a
bridge collapses as the train crosses it (shades of “The Cassandra Crossing” in
1977).

The film, following the practice of early “sound” film of the
time, has very little background music.

The DVD has a Merrie Meldies short “You Don’t Know What You’re
Doin’” demonstrating racism of the times.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

“Avengers: Age of Ultron” (directed by Joss Whedon) is based
on the eleventh of the Marvel Cinematic Universe comics franchise, and a sequel
to the 2012 film, based on the sixth.

The basic plot has to do with an AI entity called Ultron
(James Spader, from Blacklist) designed for peacekeeping, going rogue and
trying to destroy “the world”. The
program has been designed by Tony Stark (Robert Downey, JR, who won’t work for
a low budget, remember) and Bruce Banner (a middle-aged Mark Ruffalo). It has a
curious instantiation as a couple of brain-like holograms that can float in space,
rather comporting with the cosmological idea that the whole universe is a
hologram. The usual heroes have to come forward, including the Hulk (also
Bruce), Captain America (Chris Evans) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth). Scarlet Johannson ithe Black Widow, Jereny
Renner is Hawkeye, Samuel L. Jackson is Nick Fury and Don Cheadle is the War
Machine.

A lot of the action concerns an Eastern European mountain
city, and with the alphabet shown, it’s easy to wonder if this town is supposed
to be in the Ukraine, and Ultron is a metaphor for Vladimir Putin. The movie does seem like a convenient
political metaphor.

The script, at one point, discusses cyber warfare rather seriously (with a reference to Wikileaks and Anonymous without mentioning them explicitly), and I believe even mentioned the Internet "Kill switch" concept.

Late in the movie, at the two-hour mark, a huge earthquake happens,
anticipating “San Andreas”. But in fact most
of the city, with buildings collapsing and imploding, rises into the sky (an
effect known from “Avatar”).

The official site is here (Marvel and Walt Disney Pictures). It's rather interesting that Disney did not show its Magc Kingdom trademark before the film started.

I saw the film before a light late weekday afternoon audience
in 3-D at Angelika Mosaic in Fairfax VA.

I wanted to mention here that there is an indie film called "Killswitch" (also mentioed on my "BillBoushka" blog March 12), directed by Ali Akbarzadeh, which I will see as soon as it is available.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

“Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop” (2015, 82
minutes), directed by Erin Lee Carr, had played at Tribeca last month and aired
Monday night on HBO Documentary, at 9 PM.
Unfortunately, it aired at the same time as another important film on
CNN, also owned on Time Warner, by Fareed Zakaria, “Blindsided: How ISIS Shook
the World”, about national security and also Internet speech, which I recorded
an watched right after the HBO film finished.
I reviewed Zakaria’s film on my “Films on Major Threats to Freedom”
(“cf”) blog last night (see Blogger profile). It seemed to me that Monday was a
continuation of the Baltimore, Maryland Film Festival, even if I was at home. Either
of these films would have fit.

The film chronicles the legal battle of Gilberto Valle, a
former New York City policeman (at a time when police behavior has become
politically controversial) who was convicted of “conspiracy” to kidnap and then
cannibalize women (almost like “Hannibal” from “The Silence of the Lambs” from
1991, one of my favorite films of the past) based largely on a number of chat
room threads, which are often shown in the film. In 21 of 24 threads, he reportedly said this
was all fantasy, but he left things open to more interpretation in at least
three of them. He also traveled to
Maryland (the film shows shots of the Bay Bridge) near the residence of one of
the supposed female contacts, The
government claimed this was a step in a conspiracy.

So the film presents this case as a real-life “Minority
Report” (the famous sci-fi film with Tom Cruise, about “pre-crime”).

As a factual matter, a district court overturned the
conviction, but the overturning was appealed to the Second Circuit, which may
decide in June. Apparently this is not
double jeopardy. The New York Times has
a story on this part of the case here. Electronic Frontier Foundation has a
copy of the district court opinion here.

Valle was indeed properly convicted of misusing a police
department computer and formally sentenced to time served.

It seems that in terror-related cases, courts have been very willing to allow convictions based on conspiracies to commit violence. The film does go into what the normal legal standard should be for "evidence" that a plot is really going to be carried out. But it can be a very difficult line to draw.

At the trial, Valle’s wife, Kathleen Mangan-Valle testified,
although the admissibility of some testimony is limited by spousal privilege.
Slate has an account of her testimony here.
After she found the chat logs, she installed spyware to watch her
husband’s activity. The Daily Beast has another elaboration here.

The film often shows Valle, acting laid-back, lounging
around his Queens home under house arrest.
He’s an average-looking 30-year-old with Italian background. He looks in some scenes as if he’s checking
that the ankle bracelet doesn’t inadvertently shave his leg. Toward the end, he
waits for time to pass, hoping the deadline for the prosecution’s appeal will
pass, but unfortunately, it gets filed on time, but Valle has been looking at
the wrong site.

Some have said that the film will prompt the average user to empty his search history and browser cache regularly!

HBO’s site for the film is here. It can be watched online through cable
subscription. The name of the film is sometimes spelled as one word, “Thoughtcrimes”, or possibly in the singular,
“Thoughtcrime”.

On March 21, 2015 I had written about this case on my main
“BillBoushka” blog and linked to an Electronic Frontier Foundation story about
its own amicus brief to the Second Circuit.
I had also discussed an uncanny similarity to the fact pattern of a
situation that occurred in 2005 when I was substitute teaching in Fairfax
County, VA. I had posted a fictitious
screenplay treatment and script where an aging male substitute teacher arguably
based on me is “tempted” and tricked into an inappropriate (although not
explicit) encounter with a precious male student who was underage. There were a lot of happenstance coincidences
in this matter, which I discuss there and link to earlier, much more detailed
accounts (including one on Wordpress).
Here the legal question is one of “implicit content”: if a free web posting doesn’t seem to have a
“purpose” (generating revenue), could it be construed as luring someone
(eventually) into an illegal act?
Probably not, but it may be close to the line. I have a meta-screenplay
(called “Do Ask, Do Tell: Conscripted”) still under wraps) that embeds the
story of this 2005 case. Maybe it will
get made.

Monday, May 11, 2015

“The Shock Doctrine” (2009), based on the book by that name
by Naomi Klein, and directed by Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom,
explores the idea that capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and other
instability.

The film draws a curious analogy to medicine, particularly shock
treatment for mental illness in the past, along with sensory deprivation
treatment, tried in the early 60s, depicted in Montreal in this film. (The idea
of being “dulled” actually came up in my personal therapy at NIH in 1962.)

The film then moves on to major historical examples,
starting with the right-wing coup that kicked out a Marxist government in
Chile. Economist Milton Friedman, from
the University of Chicago, was called on to help implement economic “reforms”.

It then covers the confluence of Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher (“The Iron Lady”), leading to the conservative revolutions of the
1980s, where privatization of many government functions occurred and unions
were attacked (as with the airline traffic controllers strike in 1982). In time, the ratio of CEO pay to average
worker pay rose from 40 to 1 to over 400 to 1, and hostile takeovers became
common. The film covers Thatcher’s
Falklands War.

The film goes on to cover the fall of the Soviet Union, and
the consolidation of Boris Yeltsin’s power in the 1990s, with footage of the
attack on the Moscow “White House”. The
film covers the end of the Cold War in a negative light, claiming that it
knocked many or most Russians into poverty, while allowing a few oligarchs to
become billionaires and flash their wealth.
The was all “pre-Putin”. But does
it set up the aggression of Russia today, as well as the anti-gay climate (with
the law passed in 2013)?

The film covers 9/11, but noting that on Sept. 10, 2001
Rumsfeld had announced “bureaucracy” as the new enemy. But then, 9/11 created a “Before and After”
(as had AIDS 15 years before) and a “clash of civilizations”. We had totally misunderstood our world (as it
seems we do now, given ISIS). We spoke
of a “clash of civilizations”. The documentary moves on to the war in Iraq, and
notes that most Iraqi people are worse off today than they were under Saddam
Hussein.

That may be true because of the weak government and power
vacuum, allowing ISIS to rampage, but remember that much of the ISIS military
comes from Saddam Hussein’s former secular generals.

The film concludes with coverage of the 2008 financial
crisis, following on to the Russian and Asian financial crisis of the late
1990s (subject of a big Esquire issue in 1999 about young men without girl
friends).

Naomi Klein also has a short film “The Shock Doctrine: The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism”, on a page here. Klein is reported to have serious
differences with the filmmakers as to content, link here.

The feature can be rented from Netflix.

I need to mention “Deep Web” by Alex Winter, distribution by
“Bond Influence” (or Bond/360) which I missed at the Maryland Film
Festival. There seems to be an issue
with availability on cable, which I discuss on my Network Neutrality blog
yesterday. I will review it as soon as I
can get a DVD or legal link.

Sunday, May 10, 2015

When the Taliban took over much of Afghanistan in 1996 (in a
delayed aftermath of the Soviet invasion of 1979), it prohibited all
photography, and enforced the religious ban aggressively and brutally. After the Taliban was expelled by the
Northern Alliance and US forces in 2001 after 9/11, and a more moderate
government (Hamid Karzai) took over, photojournalism could return. Now, as Afghanistan’s stability is compromised
by pressure on the US to leave, the work and even the lives of journalists
there is severely threatened.

“Frame by Frame”, directed by Alexandria Bombach and Mo
Scarpelli, builds on this problem, tracking the lives of four
photojournalists. The film shows
spectacular shots not only of the mountains and deserts but also of the rural
poverty and ramshackle shelters.

But the most disturbing episode in the 85-minute film occurs
near the end, at a hospital in Herat in western Afghanistan. The city supposedly has among the highest
rates of self-immolation by women in the country. The reporter talks to the surgeon, who will
not let her film. The doctor says that a
local mullah will send men to retaliate if she reports on the mutilation issue,
or at least reports that some of these incidents are committed by men. Then,
she shows one of the women, severely burned with scars, by a male family member
.

The film was screened Sunday afternoon at the Walters Art
Museum in Baltimore, as part of the Maryland Film Festival. Mo Scapelli hosted
the QA. Mo gave a lengthy answer to my own question about the possible security implications of the film, given the conditions in Afghanistan but also the global situation now, aggravated by ISIS and the FBI's comments. She indicated that the production team was trying to arrange screenings in Afghanistan, but that it would be a while before the film would be available in any online instant play format because of safety concerns in that country.

The official site for the film is here. I thought I saw Submarine listed as a
possible distributor in the credits, but Mo said more negotiations for regular
distribution continue.

Saturday, May 09, 2015

“A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile” (directed by
Sofie Deraspe) turns out to be another wild tale of fake journalism (with
shades of “Catfish”), more than the obvious idea of anti-gay repression in a
totalitarian Islamist country.

The “woman in the film”, who actually does hosts the QA at
the Maryland Film Festival today in Baltimore,
Sandra Bagaria, lives in Montreal. She strikes an online friendship with
a supposed Amina Arraf in Damascus, Syria, in 2011. This was during all the rebellion against
Assad, before ISIL started taking over nearby.
In fact, AR-Raqqah, the supposed “capital” of ISIL, is well to the East,
but Damascus could be at risk, as in this storyby Heather Saul .

Amina runs a blog, which attracts a lot of followers and
comments (reminds me of "Gossip Girl"_. She seems to follow the
technical advice of “Blogtyrant” on Twitter.
One day, her followers learn she has been kidnapped by agents of Assad’s
regime.

But in time, it turns out this is all a hoax, set up by an
America, named Tom MacMaster (details). Here is a straight man pretending to
be a lesbian. Imagine the motives. This part of the story got most of the
attention in the QA.

The film does show some live footage of life in Syria, and
it isn’t pretty. But it isn’t hard to imagine a film that really does show life
under ISIL in the occupied area (which CNN’s “Blindsided”, by Fareed Zakaria,
not yet aired except for a featurette from a German filmmaker but due May 11,
will do).

The official site ishere .(The film is known only as “The Amina
Profile” in imdb). The distributor right
now is Sundance Selects.

Friday, May 08, 2015

“The Devil’s Violinist”, directed by Bernard Rose, is a
sharp-looking period piece (early 19th century in Italy and England)
and biography of flashy violinist-composer Niccollo Paganini, played by a
rather handsome David Garrett.

Apparently in the 19th century, sensationalism
could sell just as it does in the Internet age.
Manager Urbani (Jared Harris). British lords John Watson and his
mistress (Christian McKay and Veronica Ferres) bankroll the tour with all their
wealth, and riots break out. Old time
religion comes back.

Toward the end, Paganini gets sick, and the film says that
the Vatican would not tolerate a proper burial. History says that he may have
had Marfan syndrome, as well as syphilis or various other ailments.

The lead actor was born David Bongartz and is a skilled
violinist. His virtuoso playing in the
film is sensational. It’s unusual for
lead actors to play solo instruments in movies.
The DVD has two extras, and an interview with Garrett, where he explains
how Paganini built on composers before him (Scarlatti) and inspired Liszt, Brahms
and Rachmaninoff. The DVD also offer
Garrett and soprano Nicole Scherzinger performing a love song Paganini wrote
for a mistress, based on the second movement of the Violin Concerto #4.

To my ear, Paganini’s music has always sounded a little
superficial. The first violin concerto
is often condensed to just one movement.

The official site is here (Screen Media, produced by German company
Summer Storm).

The DVD came out rather quickly after the theatrical run
this winter of a 2013 film, in English.

Somehow, the title of this movie reminds me of “Captain
Corelli’s Mandolin”.

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Privacy Policy for billsmoviereviews.blogspot.com

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At billsmoviereviews.blogspot.com , the privacy of my visitors is of extreme importance to me. This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by billsmoviereviews.blogspot.com and how it is used.

Log Files Like many other Web sites, billsmoviereviews.blogspot.com makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol ( IP ) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider ( ISP ), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.

Cookies and Web Beacons billsmoviereviews.blogspot.com does not use cookies.

DoubleClick DART Cookie

.:: Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on billsmoviereviews.blogspot.com .
.:: Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to billsmoviereviews.blogspot.com and other sites on the Internet.
.:: Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following link.

Some of our advertising partners may use cookies and web beacons on my site. My advertising partners include ....... Google Adsense

These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on billsmoviereviews.blogspot.com send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.

billsmoviereviews.blogspot.com has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. billsmoviereviews.blogspot.com 's privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browsers' respective websites.

Especially for EU visitors: This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services, to personalize ads and to analyze traffic. Information about your use of this site is shared with Google. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies. For more info visit https://www.google.com/policies/technologies/cookies/